During reading break I stumbled upon a brand of bags that I found particularly interesting. In class we talked about creating consumer solutions and brainstorming ‘cradle-to-grave’ products. Freitag is a company that attempts to do this. Founded in 1993 by the Freitag brothers, the company manufactures messenger bags and other accessories from old truck tarpaulin, worn out bicycle inner tubes, discarded seatbelts, and airbags. They like to call their process ‘recontextualizing’, comparing it to the reincarnation of products at the end of their lifecycle.  The company was established as a result of the Freitag brothers noticing the lack of sturdy and water-repellent messenger bags and setting out to find a solution to this problem. (consumer solutions!)

In addition to creating bags from up-cycled materials, Freitag has also looked into creating clothing that is completely biodegradable. They call this F-abric. Instead of going through the normal product life cycle of a piece of clothing, garments made from F-abric can be tossed into the compost bin and biodegrade within a couple months. A full cradle-to-grave product.

I think Freitag is the perfect example of how companies can tie sustainability into their core business functions. Their business model not only saves products heading to the landfill and gives them new purpose, but also innovates from the basics to improve existing materials to ensure that they are both sexy and susty. Additionally, Freitag also happens to be extremely aware of its social impacts, basing its factories and sourcing its product parts from within Europe and maintain close relations and enforcing regulations with its local suppliers.

The entire processes they use to create bags appear to be quite eco-friendly. Even the process used to wash the tarps after their arrival at the factory is operated using 3963 gallons of rainwater. However, I cannot help but wonder whether the benefits of recontextualizing these materials outweigh the costs it inflicts on the environment.